Self-Hosted media libray - any suggestions?

[Craig Taylor]

Hi Folks,

 

It's time once again, to prove the power of crowd-sourcing information....

 

I've just been given the task to identify a Proprietary or Open Source media library for our PR & Comms team.

 

It must have the following functionality as a minimum:

 

• It must be able to be installed behind our firewall
• It must allow, image, movie and audio to be stored
• Upload/download capability
• Searchable
• Taggable

Nice to haves:

 

• Preview ability
• Rating
• Comments

Essentially we want a Flickr/Picassa type of tool, but one that MUST sit behind our firewall.

 

Any suggestions....?

 

Craig

 

[Mark Berthelemy]

Hi Craig,

Expanding on my Twitter post, I would suggest Wordpress would be a good place to start. The only problem might be with movies, as, if you want to convert things (a la Youtube) into Flash, then you'll need a more sophisticated system. Also, if you want streaming video, you'll need a media server.

If, however, you just want people to download video files, then, as long as you have the bandwidth, Wordpress would be fine.

Mark

[Brian Waters]

I would take a look at Ipernity. It's based on a Flickr format, and you can upload / download video, images, and audio. I use it privately as an alternative to Flickr primarily because it seems to be less "abused" than it's more famous counterpart.

Whether it works with / behind your firewall... you'd need to assess that, but I would think it won't sit behind the firewall as it is a public web space environment, but the good thing is you can restrict access to only the people you invite.

Another place you can look: Jane Hart from C4LPT has been following the trends over the last 4 years and has a full list of the Top 100 tools - you are bound to find the answer to this and many other burning technology issues.

[Sumeet Moghe]

Craig, this is potentially a risky solution for your kind of organisation, but you may want to consider Google Apps for the enterprise. It comes with Google Videos and in Nov/ Dec, they're also adding Picasa to the mix. It works quite well for us with the Google Docs, Videos and Sites combo, though I'm personally a big critic of Google Sites -- it creates a fragmented user experience and encourages walled gardens.

If a SaaS solution doesn't work then try Drupal/ Joomla. They have plugins to create a YouTube/ Flickr style media sharing portal. Also you may want to consider Jive SBS, which is our primary collaboration and knowledge platform at ThoughtWorks. Then again this is SaaS. Tradeclips has an enterprise offering too.

The last two enterprise class tools I'll mention are Cyn.in and Sun SLX. SLX was shaping to be an excellent media sharing platform, but Sun discontinued it and there doesn't seem to be any hope of reviving it. Cyn.in IMO is one of the most full featured enterprise class social platforms that's feature complete, supports microblogging and media sharing, runs behind a firewall and isn't hugely expensive.